To answer some of the questions our subscribers have been asking about how TIME gathers, verifies, writes and distributes its news.

TIME'S Miscellany editor claims his department is the only one which has gone completely unchanged through all the twenty years since TIME be gan.

We didn't even have a Letters column in our earliest issues (it was launched in December 1924). The first Current Affairs Test came in 1935--appeared twice a year after that until this January, when the government's paper cut order forced us to leave it out. We started Radio in 1938, Army & Navy in 1940.

But TIME has discarded as well as added a good many departments in its twenty years--:some of them because they just didn't turn out to be important enough, some (like World Fairs) when the jobs they were created for were done. There was a Crime department in our first issue which soon became a part of National Affairs (now U.S. at War)--a Law department, which merged with Finance (called Business & Finance in 1929)--a department of Aeronautics, which was renamed Transport in 1934 and later added to Business & Finance too.

We also had a department in which we Pointed With Pride (to "the annual taxes of $90 per capita which Britons bear without grumbling")--another in which we Viewed With Alarm (the "taller Japanese to be evolved by straphanging in Tokyo's new subway")--and still another called Imaginary Interviews in which the newsmakers of the past week "explained" why their names had made the headlines.

In the beginning we had a policy of ending many of our stories with a final paragraph headed "Significance," but we gave that up about 15 years ago--partly because it was too mechanical, partly because it did seem that all our stories should be written so their significance would be clear long before the last paragraph.

Off and on during the Twenties we listed important arrivals and leave-takings in a column called Coming & Going--for several years we had a department devoted to news of Animals--and there was a month in 1927 when we gave Fashions in clothes and kitchenware and conduct a department all their own.

Perhaps the greatest change in TIME over the past twenty years has been a gradual one, however: the quiet and steady expansion of every department in an effort to make each one so authoritative in its field that it can stand inspection under the expert's microscope.

And today all sorts of specialists seem to be following TIME's reporting of their field. In Washington, for example, more key officials read TIME than any other magazine, no matter how big its circulation; newspaper editors rank TIME their favorite magazine; a TIME story in Science once gave a clue to the nature of the X-particle; in the American Medical Association Journal TIME is one of the only two lay journals which have been indexed among medical publications.

TIME's General Manager is fond of saying that magazines are like people: they are born and they die, and those live longest which most readily adapt themselves to their times. We like to think that TIME has changed and grown with the world it has reported for twenty years--and twenty years from now I will be very much surprised if our table of contents is not quite different.

Right at the moment, for instance, our editors are looking forward to the day when they can drop World Battlefronts and U.S. at War--and start several new departments in which to tell the tremendous story of the better years for which we are fighting today.

Cordially,

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